The One Cause Of My Health Problems | My Candida Quest - Part 1

This is the beginning about a post series about my health. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been very good. For almost my whole life I thought the cause for that was “bad” genes. Just recently I have found out the underlying cause for my various health problems. This cause is mostly known as Candida. After I’ve done some research on that nasty yeast, I compiled some interesting information in my article Candida, Leaky Gut Syndrome and Associated Health Problems. However, I didn’t include a lot of personal information into that post, because I wanted to keep it relatively objective.

Here, I will tell my own personal story about my health issues and the suffering they caused. Candida overgrowth is a serious issue that’s not getting enough attention, or at least not the right kind of attention, as it is still a relatively controversial topic within conservative medicine, although recent research, and the experiences of lots of patients and doctors, strongly indicate that it’s a real and serious problem. Hence, there is a lack of public knowledge about this disease. That’s why I want to share my own experiences and insights regarding this health topic.

What’s This Candida Overgrowth?

Candida is a genus of yeast which can populate the human body in different places. If the Candida population isn’t too high, it doesn’t cause any problems. But there’s the possibility of Candida overgrowth in some regions of the body, like the skin, the genital region, the oral cavity, the sinus cavities, the esophagus, and the small and large intestines. Often, multiple regions at once are affected, as the yeast has the tendency to spread out.

Depending on the affected region of the body, different symptoms will occur. Especially nasty problems can occur if Candida becomes too dominant in the gut. Then it starts damaging the mucosal lining, which can cause the Leaky Gut Syndrome. In that case, the damaged mucosal lining gets worse at letting nutrients into the blood and becomes pervious to not completely digested substances, toxins and antigens from bacteria and yeasts.

These foreign substances in the blood can then cause allergies, as the immune system reacts strongly to them. Sadly, that weakens the immune system, and can finally lead to autoimmune diseases. Another problem is that the undesired substances in the blood can tax the liver a lot, which can damage it slowly but continuously. Also, the body needs to get rid of all the toxins in the blood at all cost, so some of them are stored in the skin, which then can develop several diseases.

How My Sickness Began

Phase 1: Psoriasis

Around the age of 10 my problems with psoriasis began. Of course, the doctors didn’t mention anything about Candida being a possible cause of my skin disease. Their explanations were genes and a multitude of possible environmental factors. Well, I guess it can be said that nearly every disease is caused by that general combination.

Yeah, so I got some creams and they slightly helped getting the problem under control. But it was a chronic disease, which didn’t really disappear, except at rare times when I was almost completely free from any symptoms. Otherwise, I would have irritated and flaky skin at the feet, in my face, on my testicles, or on my hands and fingers.

The problem wasn’t only that my skin was making trouble, but also that I dropped to a much lower level of energy. I needed much more sleep. Even when I got “enough” sleep, I still had dark circles around the eyes. Having to wake up early often felt like torture. But I could endure that, while I was still young and strong.

Oh, and I was overweight, but that was rather caused by my unhealthy eating habits, like my meat and dairy consumption, and a distaste for sports. At that time I had no idea that going vegan could fix my weight problems quickly.

Phase 2: Problems With Breathing And Depression

Some years later I got depressed. I was diagnosed with nasal polyps, which made it difficult for me to breathe properly. Therefore, they were removed in an operation. Interestingly, that fixed my breathing problems, as well as my depression – for a long while.

Because I had a sore throat very often, finally my tonsils were removed when I was 14. That didn’t help too much at reducing the frequency of my sore throat symptoms, but at least it reduced their intensity. Oh, and the time directly after my tonsils were removed was one of the worst times in my life. The first few days I often threw up blood. Even with ice cream and pain killers the permanent pain in my throat was intense. Two weeks after the operation I had to go back to the hospital, because my wounds started bleeding again. Yeah, that was lots of anti-fun.

Nobody ever explained to me that sore throat could be a symptom of Candida overgrowth.

Phase 3: Irritable Bowel Syndrome

After I finished high school, I started drinking lots of coke. Often 1 liter a day, and up to 2 liter on rare occasions. My belly also started hurting sometimes. It took me quite a while to notice a connection between my coke consumption and the problem that my doctor called irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). His only suggestion on how to treat it was to avoid stress. Well, I wasn’t terribly stressed out at that time. In fact, I’ve generally felt quite fine.

I didn’t know whether it was the caffeine in the coke or that sugar that was the culprit, but in any case I learned that coke was quite unhealthy for me. By avoiding soft drinks I could live without the IBS symptoms for quite a long time.

Phase 4: Going Vegan

Some semesters after I started studying mathematics I got aware that I really always have a choice between vegetarian meals and meals for omnivores. Often the vegetarian meals were quite interesting, so I started taking them more often. Basically, that’s how I started my transformation to being a vegan.

Then I began questioning my lifestyle. Even though I thought of myself as being a utilitarian, I was still an omnivore. It’s not that I wasn’t troubled by the thought of animals suffering for my food, but I still had the illusion that it wasn’t that bad. Well, my main thought was that when you are used to permanent suffering, its intensity diminishes over time, as it becomes the status quo. Anyway, now I recognize that even if such mechanisms exist, they are a very bad excuse for tolerating suffering.

Honestly, I also seemed to value my own comfort, health, and effectiveness more than the suffering of some other individuals – whether they be humans or not. I thought that their suffering could be compensated by my improving the world to a sufficient degree somehow. Strangely I had very high expectations or hopes of what I was able to do to save the world. But I didn’t know how exactly I would do that.

What really made me reevaluate the situation was the fact that eating animals is bad for health. I didn’t know that. I found out about it after reading various webpages about vegetarianism. Beginning with that insight I changed my eating habits gradually, each step supported with some information about the unhealthiness of the foods I’ve been eating so far:

1. I began reducing my meat consumption gradually.
2. Then I stopped eating regular meat completely and only consumed fish.
3. Some time later I also stopped eating fish.
4. Later on, I also discontinued eating eggs and dairy products.
5. Finally, I wanted to be a real vegan and decided not to buy any products with honey anymore.

At least the first four steps were motivated by some health information I’ve dug into. Recently, I found overwhelming support that a plant-based diet is the optimal choice. There’s a book named The China Study by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell II, which argues very convincingly that a whole-foods plant-based diet is the best one for maintaining good health.

Nevertheless, switching to a vegan diet didn’t rid me from my Candida symptoms. I felt a huge surge of energy when I finally switched to a vegan diet and didn’t consume any dairy products anymore, but that wasn’t enough to make me completely healthy.

Well, I had read that sometimes going on a vegan diet could improve the symptoms of psoriasis. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for me. Also, in the meanwhile I have developed problems with breathing, and my nose was running way too often. I was getting “colds” quite regularly and neither going to the gym, nor switching from an omnivorous diet to a vegan diet could fix that issue. But honestly I also wasn’t living on a very healthy vegan diet and still consumed some junk food like potato chips. And I also didn’t care about what’s whole-food and what not.

So, I’ve settled with the idea that my genes just were “bad” and I had to live with my health problems.

Phase 5: Big Fat Depression

As I have studied for more than four years, and have seen some of my favorite professors retire, and was becoming disappointed with the teaching situation at the university in general, I slowly fell into a state of depression. My problems with breathing somehow got worse, but I still thought that was just psychosomatic, and a response to my severe unhappiness with the situation – rather than the other way around.

In the hope that expressing some of my general worries would help me, I started writing this blog. Sadly, it didn’t help a lot. So, in my desperation I finally decided to give antidepressants a try. After reading a lot about different substances in the web, I thought that Bupropion (the effective substance in Wellbutrin) was the best stuff I could take. I sure was influenced a lot by The Good Drug Guide by the British philosopher David Pearce.

Equipped with some rudimentary knowledge about antidepressants and their effects on various neurotransmitter systems that I acquired by reading Wikipedia articles, I went to my doc and could talk him into prescribing me a Bupropion-based antidepressant. It worked pretty quickly and its effect was great. Soon, my depression was gone. I was feeling pretty fine, even though my problems with not getting a lot of oxygen through my nose wasn’t really fixed.

Phase 6: Burnout

Because I had made this fascinating progress with my depression, I thought it was safe to discontinue drug use after some months. Unfortunately, I landed in another depression one year later. And this it got so bad that I ended up burnt out completely, even though I continued taking the antidepressant I’ve used previously.

What saved me this time was that I got the hint to read the book Feeling Good by David D. Burns. It was absolutely amazing and sent me on a journey to the spheres of happiness and effectiveness I hardly ever had hopes of dreaming about. I’ve written down the most interesting parts of that journey in my blog post series From being depressed and burnt out to Being Who I Want To Be.

Still, my respiratory problems remained unchanged.

Phase 7: Allergies

Finally, I got the idea to check these problems seriously. So, I went to a specialist who diagnosed me with several allergies. It turned out that I have become allergic to house dust mites and to tree pollen. This was quite surprising to me, as I had made the same allergy test 10 years ago and I had no allergies at all!

After this diagnosis I’ve tried to minimize my exposure to the allergens which seemed to make me sick. To my frustration, almost all of my efforts seemed to be in vain, and I was still suffering from a severely congested nose. Only a cortisone spray could reduce my symptoms sufficiently – at least for a while.

The One Cause Of All These Problems

My story continued with my writing the article Candida, Leaky Gut Syndrome and Associated Health Problems. I finally found a convincing explanation for my health problems: Candida.

Skin

Let’s take a look at how Candida is able to cause my symptoms: In its fungal form, Candida can harm the mucosal lining of the small intestine. This causes increased intestinal permeability, or Leaky Gut Syndrome. Large molecules, like not completely digested food, or toxins and antigens from bacteria or fungi leave the intestine and reach the bloodstream. The body needs to get rid of the toxins, and some of them are released over the skin, which rebuilds itself regularly. In my case, regularly means relatively quickly and often in the regions that are affected by psoriasis.

Liver

Also, my liver seems to have been affected by all those toxins. Blood tests that I’ve made several years ago reveal that my liver has been troubled increasingly, even though not massively so. My doctor couldn’t interpret what that means. After I’ve made that last blood test some years ago, I searched the web for answers, but just found that a lot of people have similar problems, even though they seem to be healthy otherwise…

Allergies And Respiratory Problems

Candida is also associated with asthma, allergies, and chronic sinusitis. I have the latter, but no asthma. Still, it’s a problem that is bad enough to let me feel miserable and completely devoid of energy sometimes. It feels like I usually only get half of the normal amount of oxygen with each breath through my nose. There are times when it even feels worse. Only very rarely I can breath freely. But in those occasions my situation gets worse within minutes or hours, until I reach my vastly suboptimal status quo again.

Depression

I’m quite sure that the above respiratory problems are serious enough to cause a depression on their own. Especially, if other stress factors aggravate the situation. Nevertheless, Candida produces toxins which aren’t especially beneficial for brain chemistry. For example, like other yeasts, Candida produces ethanol.

Candida Wants Candy

Whenever I consume too much sugar, be it by drinking coke, or fruit juices, or eating too many sweets, or ketchup, my intestines make me feel sorry for doing that. Candida yeasts feast over that sugar and multiply quickly. I don’t know what it is exactly that causes the pain, but a massive Candida overgrowth is bad in any case.

Other Symptoms

• My tongue is coated virtually all the time. I think this causes bad breath to some degree.
• I’m itching in places I don’t like talking about.
• When I get out of bed I’m often very tired. Sometimes even zombie-like tired.
• My ears seem to be infected, too.

So, yeah, something’s wrong with my health. It makes a lot of sense to assume that Candida is the underlying cause of my problems. I haven’t made any reliable test, yet. But my symptoms tell me that it’s very likely that I have a Candida / Leaky Gut problem.

Initial Treatment

I wanted to try treating this disease on my own. Here are the things I’ve done at first:

• I’ve ordered grapefruit seed extract, which is supposed to have antifungal effects. Unfortunately, that effect doesn’t seem to be very strong.
• I’ve added more garlic to my food. Garlic also has antifungal effects.
• No sweets. No fruit juices. No fruit. They all contain too much sugar.
• I only consumed whole-grain products. Well, they get converted into sugars, too, but at least they also have lots of fiber.
• I’ve ordered a cheap probiotic with Lactobacillus Acidophilus.
• Tea, lots of tea.
• There are Kombucha drinks in a supermarket here. I like them very much.

This is a relatively mild treatment. It doesn’t seem to be sufficiently effective. In any case, I will need months to cure this disease. But at least, now I have an idea what’s the cause of my health problems. So, I can fight for my health!